Lab tests underway to determine if sarin was used in Syria chemical attack

An analysis is underway to determine if sarin was used in Syria's chemical attack last month. The lab tests, which will take about two weeks, are being conducted with UN support. The analysis complies with scientific standards, Russia’s FM stated.

“As Lakhdar Brahimi said, there are scientific standards the
[UN] experts are guided by,” Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergey
Lavrov told journalists Friday after a working breakfast with the
UN-Arab League envoy for Syria.

Chemists from the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical
Weapons are using samples taken from the site of the chemical
attack staged outside the Syrian capital of Damascus on August
21.

At the G20 summit in St. Petersburg, leaders of Britain, France,
and the US attempted to pressure Russian President Vladimir Putin
regarding Moscow’s position on the attack.

NATO allies have produced evidence of their own that the lethal
agent used in Syria was sarin nerve gas. British Prime Minister
David Cameron has stated that clothing and soil samples taken
from Syria tested positive for sarin gas. The UK conclusion is
based on results obtained by scientists at Porton Down in
Wiltshire, England.

“We were confident and remain confident that Assad was
responsible,” Cameron said on Thursday. British intelligence
has concluded that rebel forces have no capacity to stage a
chemical attack.

US Secretary of State John Kerry told US media last Sunday that
samples collected by first responders after the chemical attack
in the Damascus suburb tested positive for the sarin nerve agent.
Kerry made nine TV appearances in an attempt to gain public
support for military intervention in Syria.

Last Saturday, US President Barack Obama announced that he will
seek approval in Congress for the use of force against the Syrian
government.

As the US seeks approval for a possible military strike against
Syria, Russia argues that it was the opposition – not Assad’s
government – that launched the August 21 attack.

At a press conference after the G20 summit, Putin told
journalists that the alleged chemical attack in Syria was a
“provocation staged by the rebel militants expecting to get
foreign support.”

“We believe that at the very least we should wait for the
results of the UN inspection commission in Syria,” Putin said
in an interview to AP and Russia’s Channel 1 TV earlier this
week.

Obtaining the results from the lab tests will take up to a
fortnight, due to the complexity of sample probing. To determine
which agent was used in the attack, chemists must turn solid dirt
and tissue into liquid and then into gas. To do that, they
dissolve the samples in a solvent, such as methanol, before
analyzing its composition with the help of the gas chromatograph.

Sarin’s chemical signature is classified in digital code as
99-125-81. If the sarin nerve agent is present in the samples,
the chromatograph gas will show exactly this code, said Carlos
Fraga, a chemist who specializes in nerve agent forensics at the
Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland, Washington.
"You're always going to see that," he said.

But one test is far from being enough. Chemists will conduct 20
additional tests for every sample that comes back with a
99-125-81 code. Among those will be liquid chromatography-mass
spectrometry tests, gas chromatography-mass spectrometry tests,
infrared spectroscopy, and high resolution spectroscopy tests.
Each test will take around two weeks.

Experts must also determine exactly which symptoms preceded the
deaths of the victims of the chemical attack.

Other nerve agents such as soman and VX cause death in a similar
way, so chemists must verify the “chemical signature” of
the weapon in order to determine how the agent was produced. Such
information is expected to give clues as to who launched the
deadly attack on August 21 – the opposition or the Syrian
government.

All of the tests will be performed in several laboratories to
prevent possible inaccuracies of the chemical analyses.